My review of Bloomba

Okay, bottom line…its different. Qualify it! It’s like this, if you are coming from the Outlook mindset, granted, that’s not the best mindset to be coming from, it will take a bit to get use to it.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Bloomba, but I think it needs some work. Bloomba is setup for their idea of email management. Their idea is very progressive. I will even say that it is better than the Outlook vision. Bloomba uses views, like a query against a folder for you to find sought after messages. Outlook uses a filing system, like emails are saved together in a folder, defined by you. Bloomba allows for the user to create, basically, queries on the received/sent emails. These queries are like the searches in Outlook. The difference is that Bloomba makes you feel that you should be thinking a different way, like how do I find my message that is from “Bob”, received “yesterday”, through “this” mailserver, containing these words. You could possibly do the same thing in Outlook but you don’t really have to. In Outlook, you would just goto “Bob’s” folder and look in there. If you use Outlook like how I use it, you have a folder for every important thing. In Bloomba, you would have a query. So, there is no need for folders. You can put all of your messages in one folder and just do queries against it.

Since I am a database developer by trade, this line of thinking is easy for me. It is more efficient to find things. The problem comes early on with the use of Bloomba. When setting up Bloomba, it imports your messages from the existing email client to Bloomba. In doing so, it copies all of your existing folders, but not the rules governing them. When your messages are in folders it makes your queries a little bit more complicated. This is where the problem lies. I can’t wholly blame Bloomba for it neither, although Bloomba should warn you that using folders goes against their development ideology. Trust me, folder make the use of Bloomba difficult.

I have noticed that when I create queries, I usually find what I am looking for, easily. So finding messages works really well. When new messages come in, I don’t see these really easily. This goes back to the way I imported my messages in. With that first setup, I spent time creating rules to mirror those that I had created in Outlook. Although the software allows you to do this, it doesn’t have checks in place to let you know that you have new mail in these folders. Outlook will bold a folder and give a number of new pieces of mail on a folder that has unread mail. Bloomba does not. Outlook gives you the icon in the application tray. There is no such indicator for Bloomba. There is an audible notification, but you have to set that up in your initial setup. If you don’t do this, you will have no indication of new messages. You will have to check each folder by manual inspection.

The spam recognition functionality works superbly. I think that this is the main reason that I like Bloomba. I no longer have to create rule after rule after rule to filter out all of the spam. SAProxy is an addon application that fits Bloomba like a glove. When SAProxy is coupled with Bloomba, setting up the spam filtering is made easy. All you have to do is select the pieces of mail that you would like to label spam and SAProxy does the rest. I have noticed many pieces of mail come into my system and be automatically routed into the trash. I don’t even have to see it. Unfortunately, new spam is coming daily…but that is another story.

There are a few quirky things that I have seen too. Some times when I am looking through a view, a new piece of mail that doesn’t belong in the view will appear. I would have to click onto another view or folder and then back again for the display to show properly. Sometimes when searching a query the results are not what I expected and then, after clicking hither and fro, the query rights itself. I haven’t determine any set pattern but I believe that I am not crazy.

So far, I see potential for Bloomba. I haven’t read much of the documentation for I believe that things should be designed so that they are intuitive in order for them to be beneficial.

I do like this software so I will continue to use it. I look forward the next version and hope that some of the things I noticed are corrected in it. If you have the time and patience, give it a try.